The Story of My Own Road to Health

I was fairly healthy as a child until I was five years old. At this point, I contracted what was thought to be rheumatic fever and spent most of a Summer in bed. I was also given weekly injections of penicillin and took daily oral doses for a year afterward. This, of course, was back in the days before penicillin had any side effects :-). After that, I never really got up to snuff. I had severe allergies to several foods, pollen, animal dander, and molds. I was taking daily doses of powerful antihistamines and still having severe reactions. I spent most of my time fairly exhausted back before “chronic fatigue syndrome” became a popular diagnosis. My immune system was extremely weak and I caught just about everything I was exposed to. In the seventh grade, I caught German Measles for the second time and ran a fever of 106 for days. I don’t remember much about that illness but was told later that I spent a lot of time hallucinating and there was a serious question about whether I’d survive.

I had fairly severe learning disabilities and these days would have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD). Put together with all the school days I missed because of illness, school was an incredible challenge for me. Of course, back then I was just characterized as “slow”. This “diagnosis” held until I was in the sixth grade and it was found on yearly testing that my reading level was just shy of the eleventh grade. After that, things got worse because now my parents and teachers thought I was just lazy!

After doing the rounds of different medical doctors and psychiatrists (since the MDs weren’t able to find the physical causes of my problems they suggested that it was “all in my head”) I decided to take control of my health and try to help myself. I improved my diet, became vegetarian and started practicing yoga. All of this made improvements in my health and general energy but didn’t really solve any of the above health problems, simply taking the edge off them.

In 1974, shortly after the birth of our son, a fellow yogi talked me into getting an appointment with Dr. George Goodheart, a Detroit chiropractor. I was simply amazed! Within a short time, he had more information about my health problems than all the other doctors I had seen combined! I was a little skeptical about his use of muscle testing as a diagnostic tool and I’m afraid I gave the good doctor a bit of a hard time, making him repeat muscle tests “now that I was really ready for him”. I was extremely fortunate to have ended up in the office of an incredible genius and founder of applied kinesiology! As I started studying some of the conditions he suggested were indicated by the muscle tests, I was excited to find that they described my symptoms very closely!

Within a short period of time, I started seeing real improvement in my health that went beyond anything I had been able to accomplish on my own and far beyond what other doctors had been able to do for me. So far traditional medical care had done almost nothing for my chronic problems aside from temporarily covering up my symptoms with drugs. As the months went by, my health became better than I thought possible. My chronic problems had been going on so long that they seemed almost normal to me! The most I could imagine was everything “feeling better”. It had been so long since I’d been healthy, I literally could neither remember nor imagine what true health would be like! I started feeling “superhuman” and it took awhile for me to realize that what felt superhuman to me was just the restoration of normal health.

My health kept improving and every year I could look back and see the improvement from the previous year. So many people have the idea that, as we age, our bodies and health gradually degenerate. My experience has actually been just the opposite! I was so inspired with the dramatic change Dr. Goodheart had made in my life (not to mention that of my wife and son but that’s another story) that I decided to go back to college to take the prerequisites I needed to enter Palmer College of Chiropractic so that I could help others as I had been helped. I had dropped out of college years earlier because it was just too difficult with my health and learning problems. I was delightfully surprised to find how much easier school was.

Dr. J. Hogg

I am now able to run a full-time chiropractic applied kinesiology practice as well as teach a 100-hour course in applied kinesiology each year to other healthcare providers. During the Winter months I am exposed to colds and flu, often several dozen times a week. The only time I ever catch a cold (about once a year) is when I’m silly enough to let myself get run down from several weeks of insufficient sleep. I take no drugs or antihistamines yet have only occasional mild allergy problems. I have energy that was beyond my imagination forty years ago and am constantly learning more to improve the quality of the care I offer my patients.